4 Tools to Help with Color Palette Development

I love colors. I love how colors can command your attention while subtly change your feelings and attitude, just be looking and be around them! It’s pretty amazing how we react to so such a quiet piece of the design puzzle. As much as I love colors, I absolutely despise developing color palettes. Colors can be really complex and to use them effectively as I’ve described, it takes a true color ninja. I’m far from a color ninja and need some help. I’ve found some tools that have helped me put colors together into defined palettes.

Adobe have given the design community an avenue to share their color palettes. You can browse, search, gain color inspiration, comment, and rate user color palettes. That’s fine and dandy, but the real power in this web app is the color palette generation. You can pick colors by color families, select colors from an uploaded image, or play around with the sliders and selectors. It serves you the HSV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX color values. If you’re logged in, you can save and share your color palette.

Colors Scheme Designer has the standard color pickers, but it has some nice added features. You can adjust colors through saturation, brightness, contrast, and other adjustment presets. It serves up the RGB color values in standard RGB, “web safe”, Pantone, and RAL color Spaces. Colors Scheme Designer has a nice preview of your color palette used in a simple website mockup. You can then export your color palette as CSS, TXT, XML or Photoshop and Gimp swatches! Interestingly, it also offers desaturated views of your color palettes to simulate those with color blindness.

Color Hunter is a simple web tool that pulls colors from images and creates usable color palettes. What’s nice about this app is that you can search flickr for different keywords to pull up images to use. It even has a neat warrior processing animated gif.

Peppermint is a fully functional color palette app for the iPhone. If you see an object or a scene that could potentially be used in a color palette, you can take a picture of it and upload it to Peppermint and pull colors from it. You can also try Iromihon Color Palette if you’re on the Android.

Hey! This wasn't written by a bevy of otters! It was written by Brian Kwa, who does awesome work at Loud Dog, a digital branding firm in San Francisco that helps businesses express themselves authentically via identities, websites, and marketing collateral.

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